” The Al Jazeera reporter Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian, was standing on the roof of the station’s office just after dawn, doing a live broadcast of the warfare in Baghdad when the building was hit, by two air to surface missiles, officials at Al Jazeera headquarters said.”
- from The New York Times

I was surfing the three American news channels last night (or, rather, the two American news channels and “Rupert’s Republican Revue”) when I saw (what I believed to be) Tariq Ayoub getting killed. It was a horrifying perspective on the war, as we watched (what might have been) a man being slain live, and from the victim’s perspective. At the very least, we watched a camera and possibly the man behind it get shot.

But the amazing, bizarre, and unreported story here is that although the tragedy aired live on CNN and MSNBC, neither network saw it. This is not, I think, a tale of media bias - just a story of plain, old-fashioned, block-headed incompetence.

Here’s the scene: It was 1 AM, EDT. I had already slipped into my satin smoking jacket and tasseled fez and was about to ring my manservant for my customary late-evening sherry before retiring to the boudoir to read at my charming wife’s side, when all of a sudden -

- I noticed a tank battle on CNN. They’d gotten ahold of a feed from Abu Dhabi TV, and they were providing a translation. MSNBC also grabbed it. Fox News did not, opting instead to stay in-studio and have their experts debate whether Saddam Hussein had been “smashed to smithereens” or “blown to kingdom come.” It was an electrifying debate, with both sides presenting fair and balanced viewpoints (to my mind the “smithereens” side had the more compelling arguments), but I elected to keep my eye on the actual, live warfare that the other networks were offering.

Two American tanks were withdrawing across a bridge in Baghdad, occasionally firing at targets on the other side. Once or twice I saw what looked like one of the tanks taking a hit from opposing forces, but neither network commented on it, so I assumed that I was misreading the situation.

Then, suddenly, I heard shots and saw what looked to me like small weapons fire hitting the balcony directly in front of the camera. A second later the camera spun wildly and hit the floor, focussing briefly on a wall before Abu Dhabi cut the feed.

Stunned, I waited for a reaction from Aaron Brown, who at that moment was engaged in yet another telephone conversation with yet another Expert, analyzing the general war plan (”blow ‘em up,” seemed to be the US strategy, according to the crack analyst). Frustrated, I flipped to MSNBC. They too had the Abu Dhabi feed, but they hadn’t noticed it either: they were offering advanced analysis of the “bunker buster” attack that had occurred 18 hours before.

I spent the next hour and a half flipping in disbelief between the networks. Abu Dhabi was frequently on-screen. They were endlessly replaying the terrifying footage and commenting on it in excited tones, but the translations had at that point ceased. Aaron Brown continued to maunder on about the day’s events, and MSNBC was failing once again to contain Bob Arnot, whose supply of Ritalin apparently ran out during the first week of the campaign and was prattling incoherently about the activities of the unfortunate marine unit with which he’s been embedded. Fox’s ceaseless parade of retired officers (all of whom bear a striking resemblance to George C. Scott in”Dr. Stranglelove”) continued, with the talk now shifting to the topic of if it mattered whether or not we’d nailed Saddam, given the overwhelming success of the rest of the campaign…

Once again, this continued for 90 minutes, with the final moments of the unfortunate cameraman being aired again and again without any (English) commentary. Finally, around 2:30 AM, CNN and MSNBC reported that Al Jazeera was claiming that a cameraman had been killed, some footage of him being carried to an Abu Dhabi van in what looked like a tablecloth was aired, but still no connection was made between the victim and the footage that we’d been seeing.

Eventually, Fox News made the connection between the footage and the death, and their analyst said that these things happen in wartime and speculated that the perpetrator could very well have been Iraqi.

By now it was three AM, and I elected to retire for the evening. The last thing I saw was Bob Arnot in the field, chattering on with the intonations of an over-enthusiastic eight year-old who wants you to learn everything he knows about dinosaurs in five minutes’ time.

This morning the news services have picked up the story, though the plight of this particular reporter has been confused with that of two others, and the cause of death is being variously referred to as “rocket fire,” “airstrikes,” and “bombing.” MSNBC seems to finally have the actual story, identifying the incident as being caused by American tank fire (scroll all the way to the bottom to read it, under “Other Developments”).

To my untrained eye, the facts as they occurred seemed fairly obvious: There was the sound of gunfire. The plaster from the balcony flew directly upwards from the camera’s perspective, indicating to me that the shots came from the direction that the camera was pointing, and possibly from below. There had seemed to be only a few shots fired at the time, and my initial reaction was “Geez, that cameraman’s been taken out.”

Everyone speaks of bias and conspiracy in the media these days, assembling huge dossiers of stories that were altered, edited, or even omitted due to the alleged agendas of news organizations: They’re a bunch of effete liberal bleeding-heart subversives. Or they’re a horde of gung-ho cheerleading conservative toadies. But last night made me wonder if there is a third possibility.

What if they just suck?

Last night a cameraman documented quite possibly his own wartime death on live television. Despite the fact that our venerable anchors and analysts were watching it, and watching the endless replays, not a one of them had the ability to notice or remark upon what was on the screen in front of them. I’m not a reporter, and I probably have many of the facts wrong. But I know I saw some sort of - what would a reporter call it? - event happening.

Maybe there isn’t a vast conspiracy of any flavor. Maybe our media’s reporters haven’t been trained to interpret on-camera military action. Maybe their teleprompters obscure their view of the screen.

Maybe they just suck.

[Update - Fox News is reporting that an Abu Dhabi camera “in the same area” as the late Tariq Ayoub was “knocked down, but no one was injured.” Whatever truth eventually emerges, my point remains: our anchors and analysts didn’t notice it, remark upon it, or attempt to discover what had happened when a journalist’s position was quite obviously fired upon right before their eyes. The Eyes of the World are watching, but there appear to be no open conduits to the Brains of the World. My research suggests that there may be a problem with the Visual Cortex of the World.]